Surfacing

The theme of my inner season seems to be “surfacing.” When Alice was lost in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts yelled, “Off with her head,” Alice escaped by simply waking up. I think my own ascent involves facing a lot more dirt. Somehow years of deaths and relocations and personal health issues have left me unemployed, carless, without local friends, in a state of what feels like permanent pre migraine, in suburban NJ, and yet I count myself extremely lucky. I am warm, well-fed, and loved. And I have a computer. I have learned to keep myself company. So, I talk to you like you exist. You are reading this!

I do feel like I have lost my head, but that my head was overrated at best.

Do you know the earthworm’s skin is covered with light sensitive cells and that some worms have five hearts, or aortic arches? Oh behold, the five-hearted earthworm. Earthworms are also hermaphrodites with complicated love lives. With their muscular contraction they are essentially swimming through the soil, making friends and composting.

When I was a child my mother and I raised earthworms in a giant bed we kept covered. They lived in a luscious darkness and we fed them scraps from our table, bread crusts and orange peels and coffee grounds, and they made beautiful soil for our garden which grew tomatoes and greens and cucumbers and melons and flowers.

So I woke up and realized I am deep underground, but rising, slowly, and so I identify with the bulb aspect of self, and not the flower, not even the root. I am planted with bulbs. We all are.

Right now the bulbs are sleeping.

I am working on writing novels. It prevents me from writing more poems, though not a blog apparently. Thanks to a friend Nita who back in October nonchalantly sent me a link to NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month) saying we should do this, she had once before and she was going to do it again, I found myself writing my first novel in November 2009. It had no plot but I achieved the goal of 50,000 words and then some, officially uploading 67,218 words though more floated in the computer, and it kept me out of the hospital by helping me tune out my bizarre migraines which make it so that sometimes I don’t recognize my own elbow.

I highly recommend Nanowrimo. Don’t say you can’t. Just do it. Start and continue.
I had so much fun that now that the New Year rolled around I decided, ‘Well, better write another one.’ And so here I am, at 3000 words, and this time I have a plot. No outline and no real skill, but this time I have a plot, a thing which proved elusive in November. In November I learned that I could sit in a chair and do the writing, and I began to learn how and when to use first and third and even second person perspectives more effectively, like a child with her first three fat red, yellow, and blue crayons. This time I am learning how to order events so that they make some sort of sense to the rational mind.

The bulbs are storing their sugar, dreaming sleep. Dreaming awakening. I raise my cup of tea to you.